Reading through the latest version of string.c, pondering the best way to integrate the grey and (what colour is cvs parrot?) versions, I came across the following line in unmake_COW: s->buflen = s->strlen; which got be a little confused - I seem to recall buflen as being in bytes, and strlen as being in encoding-defined characters. Did something change when I wasn't looking, or is this a bug just waiting for somebody to actually implement Unicode? -- Peter Gibbs EmKel SystemsThread Next